Stirling Moss is in the ground-floor office of his London house and is filling his bath on the third floor. How is this possible? There is only one Stirling Moss, and although Britain’s most renowned racing driver often tipped the needle past 100mph in his heyday, even he can’t be in two places at once. The secret is remote control: 78-year-old Moss presses a button on a control panel behind his desk and the taps automatically start running upstairs. “In five minutes and 20 seconds, it will fill the bath to exactly the right depth, with water of exactly the right temperature,” he says. “Meanwhile, I can just carry on with whatever I’m doing.”

This house, which now has six levels, from the basement to the guest suite on the fourth floor, was built for the racing star at the height of his fame in 1962. He was living in another property on this Mayfair street – a house he bought for £12,000 in 1954 – when he noticed a plot of land for sale. It wasn’t the most attractive patch, having been roughed up by Germans, but he managed to buy it for just £5,000. He had some ambitious plans: “It was the last second world war bomb site in Mayfair,” he says. “And I realised if I bought it, I could build exactly what I wanted.”

What he wanted, clearly, was a gadget-packed pad that would be the envy of a superhero or a Bond villain. Sit on the sofa in the room Moss likes to call “the nook” on the first floor, press a button on the wall, and a motorised section of the beamed ceiling slowly descends to become a table above your lap. On the second floor, a giant tray slides smoothly on tracks through the service hatch between the kitchen and the dining room to facilitate food service. Other remote-control buttons in the same panel open wooden cabinets containing the hi-fi and one of several televi-sion screens dotted round the house. Seated at his desk in the office, Moss presses a button and another section of this ceiling descends, apparently suspended by string. “It’s so my secretary can pass me letters and things to sign from upstairs,” he says.

If you don’t feel like negotiating the spiral staircase, there is a unique lift, specially made for Moss out of racing-car carbon fibre by the Williams Formula One team. Even the lavatory seats are special, being electrically heated for maximum comfort. “I’ve always loved gadgets,” says Moss. “My father did, too. He was a dentist by trade, but he was a frustrated engineer and was always inventing things.”

In many aspects, this house resembles one of those hilarious “homes of the future” beloved of design exhibitions and Tomorrow’s World programmes in the 1960s, when we believed we would soon be eating our food in pill form and flying with the aid of jet-backpacks. In some respects, though, Moss’s home was genuinely pioneering.

When The Sunday Times Magazine featured it back in 1963, the kitchen included a “washing-up machine” – an early version of what we now call a dishwasher. “And in the 1960s, I had one of the first televisions that were operated by remote control,” recalls Moss. “It was called a Dynatron, and it had a great big cable coming out of it, with a button for changing channels. It was totally state of the art.”

He remembers that the house cost “about £25,000 to £30,000” to build, and that the project hit a snag early on. “When we started to excavate to put the foundations in, we found an underground stream.” This meant Moss had to “tank” the basement – line it with waterproof render – to ensure that moisture didn’t seep into the property.

Initially, Moss lived here alone as one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Two wives came and went, and he now shares the house with Susie, his third, more than 20 years his junior. Occasional oriental knickknacks, such as a large wooden sculpture of a clothed cat in the hallway, are reminders that Susie grew up in Hong Kong.

Most of the memorabilia here relates to her husband of 28 years and his racing past. A display cabinet in Moss’s office contains Dinky-sized models of most of the 84 different cars he drove between 1948 and 1962, including Ferraris, Maseratis and Aston Martins. High on the wall opposite, where a country squire might display a couple of stags’ heads, are two mangled steering wheels – trophies from two of the crashes that Moss miraculously survived. One is from the Lotus-Climax that he drove during practice for the Belgian Grand Prix in 1960, when he broke his back, and the other is from the disaster that brought his racing days to an end and nearly killed him: his crash at Goodwood in 1962, after which he remained in a coma for 38 days.

Since then, Moss has forged a successful second career out of making personal appearances at automotive-related events around the world. He can often be found giving talks and signing autographs in America.

For many years, he has entertained the notion of having a home on the other side of the Atlantic, too. And since he is so particular about his day-to-day needs – from motorised tables to self-filling bathtubs – this would have to be custom-made. So now, nearly 50 years after his first new-build project, he has bought a plot in Florida and found an architect for the job.

“I want to make the new house as ecofriendly as possible,” says Moss. The building, which will be situated on a 2,300 sq ft plot by a canal in Deerfield Beach, north of Fort Lauderdale, will use Greenblock technology, which involves pouring concrete between layers of polystyrene to create thick insulated walls with very low U-values (meaning they have excellent heat retention). The roof will have two big stretches of solar panels for converting the Sunshine State’s greatest resource into everyday electricity.

While he ensures his house is kind to the planet, Moss is also taking precautions against the planet being unkind to the house – so it will be hurricane-proof and tornado-resistant, with virtually indestructible glass in the windows and no overhanging sections to tempt high winds. In the event of a power cut, the generator will kick in automatically, “to keep the wine cold and the air conditioning going”.

Being a Moss residence, the two-storey house will also feature one or two innovations. “I want a breakfast trolley that will run, all by itself, from the kitchen to the patio when I press a button,” he says. This will effectively be a robot, he explains, possibly guided by a magnetic strip in the floor.

And William Chapin, Moss’s Florida-based architect, has excited him with the idea of “a really unobtrusive chairlift that doubles as a dumb waiter to serve food”. Outside, the former speedster will have a small boat with its own boathouse, where he can push a button to activate sprinklers that will wash the salt off the bodywork. He also wants an infinity pool.

Moss, who is tight-lipped about the budget for his dream home, believes the house could be a perfect transatlantic marriage of materials. “It would be jolly nice to use some really good products from Britain, so it could be a showcase for British technology.”

This Anglo-American Florida eco-house is an extraordinary project for a 78-year-old – albeit a fit and energetic one. “I’m a frustrated architect,” Moss tells me at one point, and it seems that his main frustration has been a lack of time. “If I could have done it when I was younger, I’d have done it, but I’m just so busy.”

As well as being a globetrotting ambassador for motor sport, Moss is a London landlord. When he retired 46 years ago, “at 32, unemployed, with no knowledge of anything”, he took over a portfolio of dental surgeries and residential properties his father had built up and rented them out. He now has 43 tenants and derives half his income from them – many years ago, the chef Marco Pierre White was among them. “All my properties are within scooter distance,” says Moss, who doesn’t have a car any more, but zips around London on a three-wheel Honda Giro to tend to his tenants’ occasional needs.

Before the chequered flag is waved to signal the end of the interview, I wonder out loud if Moss’s new appetite for green living is a kind of “eco-payback” for the environmental damage he did with the clouds of exhaust from 529 races. “I suppose you could say that,” he laughs. “But a cow is as bad as four cars – did you know that? So I won’t be keeping cows.”

For more details about Moss’s Mayfair house and his Florida project, go to www.stirlingmoss.com

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